I was late to the Kimmy Schmidt train, I admit. When it dropped, I was in the midst of a massive Hawaii 5-0 binge (and this winter in Boston has been such that I needed four seasons of pretty people with cheekbones that could cut paper in a place where warm still existed, so I have no regrets. None) and then I had a Sunday where I was out of 5-0 and so I watched one episode.
Then another.
Then all the plans I had for the day of doing, well, anything, evaporated and Netflix did their thing (twice) as asking “Are you still watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?” like YES NETFLIX YES I AM DON’T JUDGE ME FOR USING YOU IN THE MANNER INTENDED WHY SO JUDGEY.
And then that was it. I watched the entire season in one day.
This was a Tina Fey series originally sold to NBC as a mid-season pickup, but then sold a two season order to Netflix. I think this was ultimately a good choice for the show- NBC is not the go-to place for comedies anymore, and very few network comedies that aren’t the cut-and-dried format of The Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men do well. The pressure to cancel a show that’s underperforming in the (outdated and frankly ridiculous) Neilsen ratings is HUGE, and NBC falters a lot. Netflix, however, can capitalize on bring-watching and word-of-mouth. Also you can do a lot more things on Netflix that network standards and practice would clutch their pearls over.
This show is, quite frankly, darkly delightful. Kimmy and three other women have spent 15 years in captivity by the incredibly charismatic and manipulative reverend of an apocalyptic cult , being told that the world had ended and they were chosen by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne to survive the Rapture. Kimmy has been there since she was kidnapped at the age of 14, and once they are rescued (and discover the world hadn’t ended like they had been told), they go to NYC for a Today Show interview and Kimmy decides to stay and make a life for herself, rather than go back to Indiana where her status as a “mole woman” victim would forever define her.
She finds an apartment (landlady: Carol Kane, roommate: the delightful Tituss Burgess) and a job: Nanny for Jane Krakowski) and through mishaps, luck, grit, and a general feeling that she can make things work, gradually learns how to function in the world. It’s not all wine and roses, though, because through flashbacks to the bunker, and throw-away lines and moments, we see that Kimmy is not Okay. She’s unbreakable, because she chooses not to be, but there are a lot of ways that she is deeply fucked up. She doesn’t have anyone to talk to, because she doesn’t want anyone to know who she is- once they do, she will always be that victim to them. She hopes that saying she’s perfectly fine will make her perfectly fine, but she’s incorrect.
There are so many ways this could have gone wrong, but this works because Kimmy as a character is a sunny person who is determined to live her life. The show manages to acknowledge that what Kimmy went through is awful without dwelling or minimizing it, plus Ellie Kemper is utterly charming. She’s not grimly determined, she’s cheerfully determined. Even when she’s at her lowest (her money has been stolen, she lost her job before she started it, even Titus is like “go home, little girl, this city is not for you”) and she’s about to break, she actively decides not to, slaps a smile on her face, and goes on.
Tituss Burgess plays her roommate Titus, a struggling/aspiring Broadway actor who is given the job of helping Kimmy. He’s gay and black, and in lesser hands could be just a stereotype, but Tituss plays him with such fun and empathy and also his face is amazing. He’s not there just to serve Kimmy’s storyline, but has a lot to do on his own. What really works is that Kimmy’s influence does help him, just as his influence helps her, even when they aren’t together. This is exactly how characters should support each other, and I love it.
I could go on and on about the actors and characters, but then this post would be SO LONG and you should just go watch the show. There’s so many fun characters and ridiculous commentary (Titus gets better treatment dressed as a werewolf than as a black dude. “HERE HOLD MY BABY”)
Dude!Roommate described his imagined pitch for the show as being “What if we did a show where the whole subtext is “Oh, honey”?” Because Kimmy doesn’t know how to person, she makes a lot of mistakes that just make me go, “Oh, honey. NO.” There’s a lot of quick reaction shots of Titus clearly thinking that very thing (or just coming out and saying “What white nonsense is this?”).
There are so many things this show does right- cult survivors have written about how Kimmy’s delight at simple things like running around and working water fountains is accurate to their experiences on re-entry. So is the frustration at not knowing how things function. But what sets Kimmy up for thriving is that she is unbreakable: “The worst thing that could happen to me happened in my own front yard.” Kimmy is all about agency, as much agency as she can grab with both hands. Even when she’s in the bunker, and most of her agency is taken away, she holds on to as much agency as possible, and in doing so, helps keep the other women sane(ish) as well. She genuinely likes people, she wants to help them, and she’s good at it, even if her methods need a little updating. (“PHONES ARE CAMERAS NOW.”)
Of course, there are some elements that need addressing. One of Kimmy’s love interests is a Vietnamese character named Dong, and he’s a recent immigrant, delivers Chinese food and is good at math. He’s also kind, funny, and is written to turn a lot of the usual jokes on their heads, so… There’s been a lot written about “is this racist” and “how racist is this” and a lot of it made me kind of uncomfortable. NPR Codeswitch’s Kat Chow has a really good post on this subject: “Does Dong push back against Asian stereotypes, or does he just prop them up?”
What’s less defensible (and has generated a lot of discussion) is Jane Krakowski’s storyline. (Spoilers, maybe? IDK.) She’s an American Indian woman passing as white (with parents hilariously played by Gil Birmingham and Sheri Foster). The fact that Krakowski is as white as me (read: pretty damn white. Like, the WHITEST) and is supposed to be an American Indian is just… I don’t like it. It’s a weird variant on whitewashing, and saying you’re whitewashing while you’re whitewashing doesn’t suddenly make it okay, you know? Some people are super offended by this story line, some people think it’s hilarious, and I’ve seen people who identify as Native come down on both sides on this. I just kind of wish the creators and writers hadn’t done that?
I think the thing about The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that makes me the most happy is how it defines “survivor.” So often in the media we are shown women and children who have had something horrible happen to them, and the narrative is that they will be forever a trauma victim, or a trauma survivor. Either way, we are told (and they are told), that trauma is first and the rest of their lives is shaped around it. What Tina Fey and the writers of the show are saying here is that it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a point where it’s clear that she has to deal with what happened to her, and the show never pretends that “This never happened to me and I walked out of that hatch and everything is TOTALLY NORMAL” is a valid long-term coping skill. Being a Mole Woman will always be a part of Kimmy’s story, but she is more than that. She’s not a “mole woman,” but she is, and she always will be Kimmy. And Kimmy is unbreakable.
Sarah:
A day or so before RedHeadedGirl started telling us about how much she liked this show, I received an email from Brynhild, who had a LOT of things to saw about how much she dislikes The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. With her permission, I wanted to share that perspective with you, too. Here’s Brynhild:
This might not be the best place to do this, but I need a sympathetic ear while I still have the clarity that accompanies being SUPER PISSED OFF at my disposal. Kimmy Schmidt has romantic elements that might interest some of the readership, and I wanted to give my take on it.
My husband’s friends and I like to watch TV shows together. We finished True Detective (which I hate-watched, thoroughly enjoying every illogical and weirdly-written, philosophically-overblown moment) and wanted something that was lighter fare. Kimmy Schmidt was a Netflix original, and since Netflix was responsible for making Derek and Orange is the New Black available to us viewers, I went in thinking this would be a comedy dark enough to address some of the issues presented in the trailer but light enough to stay hopeful.
I was very, very wrong. The show united us as a group- there was something in it for everyone to hate. Even our friend with the most irreverent sense of humor couldn’t take it anymore and said, “This is bullshit!” It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good, it’s just bad.
The first episode started off almost entirely like the trailer, which I thought was a bit odd. It was jerky, almost as if it had been filmed as a trailer and not an intro for a longer series. The story follows a group of women dressed like Fundamentalist LDS members, who live underground as part of an apocalypse cult. They think the world outside the bunker has been destroyed. Then, a SWAT team raids the bunker and they are rescued. The intro is a Gregory Brothers autotune throwback that feels several years too late and lacks the effort and charm of an actual Gregory Brothers video. Cue the media storm and Today interview. The rest of the women decide to go back to Indiana, but Kimmy stays in New York and tries to start fresh.
Cue abundant sitcom cliches: on her first night in the city, Kimmy’s backpack is stolen, along with all of her money. She gets a job as a nanny for a woman with children from hell and loses it on the first day. The teenage daughter is an amalgamation of teen movie stereotypes who exists only as an antagonist and has no real personality. Seriously, here, wearing black and wearing dark lipstick = bratty teen, which is a good display of how many comedic shortcuts this series takes. The younger son she nannies is irredeemably spoiled, and yet we’re supposed to care about him because he has an absentee father, even as the kid is whining about how much his birthday party sucks and how he already has all the gifts he got. The writers obviously want us to pity them, but they do absolutely nothing human that would invoke feelings of pity.
Kimmy opens her mouth in such huge smiles so constantly that I’m reminded of a python attempting to swallow a deer, and YELLS ALL OF HER LINES BECAUSE SHE IS SO HAPPY AND UNBREAKABLE, Y’ALL.
Kimmy’s roommate is a one-note sassy-gay-friend stereotype that would’ve felt disrespectful twenty years ago, let alone now. He has no complexity and very little likeability, and takes monetary advantage of both Kimmy and their landlord right off the bat. But all of a sudden, he and the white, straight heroine are best friends, despite knowing almost nothing about each other and having very little chemistry.
Lazy writing and lack of jokes aside, there are some EXTREMELY problematic elements of this series that make me see more red than anything else.
– The women are, with one exception, not willingly members of the apocalypse cult. They have been kidnapped. What is most egregious about this is that they are very thinly-veiled versions of Ariel Castro’s victims in Cleveland, with a dash of FLDS thrown in to make fun of two sets of victims at once: the religious zealot kidnapper even lures the women to his car with the promise of puppies, just as Castro did in real life. This started to dawn on me about halfway through the first episode, and the fact that someone (especially someone I respect as much as Tina Fey) would have the audacity to base sitcom characters on actual kidnapping and rape victims makes me feel positively ill. Much of the humor is at their expense.
– Any repercussions of their captivity are glossed over. In the third episode, a PTSD flashback is played off as a joke.
– There is an extended gag involving an elderly man with dementia. Two characters take advantage of his confusion to escape an awkward date.
One of the reasons I loved the show Derek so much as its ability to document, with a high degree of accuracy, the surreal feeling one can get while working with people with memory-related illnesses. Awkward situations frequently arise, and it takes patience and compassion, NOT pity, to work effectively in these situations. All the while, though, Derek portrayed the elderly with the utmost respect and sensitivity, without becoming sappy.
My mom has worked in memory care units for much of the past few decades, and I have spent some time working in care facilities myself. I lost my grandmother to Alzheimer’s, too, a process that went on for more than fives years. And one of my absolute NO buttons is making fun of people with dementia or memory loss. It was hell for her and hell for us, either despite or because we all lived far apart from each other (I’m in Finland, but my grandmother and mother lived on opposite side of the US at the time).
Watching Kimmy Schmidt, at this point, I flipped my TV the double bird. Then I did again five minutes later. I am by no means ladylike, but this is uncharacteristic even for me.
– The billionaire trophy wife has a GASP HORRIBLE SECRET- she is actually Native American! Her roots are growing in and she’s in danger of being found out! The attempts at deconstructing stereotypes about Native Americans are ultimately too little, too late. The man who plays her father was one of the werewolves in Twilight. The poor man can’t catch a break. Never mind that the trophy wife is played by a white actress.
– The show is trying to make fun of everyone and everything without having earned the right to do so or having enough complexity to the jokes to pull them off. Shows like South Park work for me because underneath all that obscenity is (usually) an actually progressive message that makes fun of the racists and sexists more than it does the victims. The most biting social commentary in Kimmy Schmidt is the ‘WHITE WOMEN FOUND’ headline shown at the beginning of the first episode, and it’s all downhill from there.
Whew. I am sorry for the pages and pages I just wrote, but this has been cathartic. We will not continue watching this. I’m trying to convince our group that we should watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine because the acting is much better, the jokes are better, and Andre Braugher’s stone-faced Holt is one of the best characters I’ve met in quite some time. Wish me luck. Dr. Finland (my new nickname for my husband) and I just finished it but I am already raring to watch it (B99) again.
So what about you? Have you watched this show? Did you like it, or did it make you angry? Or were you somewhere in the middle?
And, if you haven’t and you’re curious, season one of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is available on Netflix, and season two is in the works.
I admire Brynhild for making it to episode 3- I didn’t. I made it through the pilot and turned it off.
I wanted to like it as a premise, but it was just so over the top and cringe-worthy that it really did not work for me. The characters weren’t so much characters as caricatures.
Hey, that’s me! For a while, I was feeling like something must be wrong with me because everybody was talking about how good this show was. I mean, I don’t really judge people for liking it because I want to give the benefit of the doubt to the show’s creators. I think their hearts are ultimately in the right place, and they are intending to lampoon the various stereotypes that are in the show. But something ultimately failed for us. If something turned me off so much after three episodes, I don’t really want to stick around waiting for it to get good. I think some shows just will not work for some people. I could not deal with GoT, no matter how much everyone loves it. And I get sad that shows like Agent Carter don’t get the attention they deserve.
More happily, though, we have LOVED Daredevil so far. It’s got all your favorite action and superhero cliches, but some very charming actors and interesting twists. Daredevil himself hovers over the line between hero and antihero, and the morality of what he’s doing is a silent hypothetical question- there’s a pretty genius juxtaposition of his work in the courtroom versus his work outside the courtroom. And the potential love interest is NOT the first white girl he comes across- so the trope is very nicely averted.
RHETORICAL. I meant RHETORICAL.
I am so with RHG on this one. It took me a bit longer than one day to watch the entire season, but just a teensy bit.
There is an element of ‘wait for it’ that is required with this show, and it is so worth it. Without spoiling anything, let me just say that Brynhild surely didn’t watch long enough to see what the teenage daughter was really all about – beyond the ‘bratty teen’ stereotype. That character revelation is kind of a parallel to the show itself. Prepare to be wrong about a lot of assumptions.
I actually feel this show is Seinfeld-esque. While often outlandish, the characters and situations seem somehow familiar and totally possible. For example, I am terrible at compassion – I feel it, I just suck at expressing it. Titus trying to be supportive and comforting in the first two minutes of episode 11 had me laughing crazily and wiping tears from my eyes (in the gate area of the New Orleans airport, no less). That could have been me in that scene.
The above defense arguments being said, I completely agree that it is irreverent and so not politically correct – on the surface. (See above about revelations and assumptions.) For what it’s worth, I also admit that I nod my head (and laugh) throughout ‘Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist’ from Avenue Q. Embrace the fact that Tina Fey is SNL-raised and expect this show to reflect the same lack of respect for propriety as the sketch comedy program. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is absolutely over-the-top, and that is precisely what I love about it.
Fortuitous! My husband and I LITERALLY started watching this last night. Spoilers RE the Krakowski storyline:
Growing up a “half breed” in a small town where there where a lot of other Native Americans in Canada, I can say there is a lot of pressure to both look and act white. It’s desirable to young Native American women who want to fit in and be popular, because so little about us is considered traditionally beautiful by pop culture and the media. We get teased for having coarse hair, for having heavier cheekbones, for having dark brows… the girl who bullied myself and others relentlessly in junior high was Native American, dyed her hair blonde, and worked to cultivate a loud valley girl accent. Even the guys get it… there were the guys walking around in long hair in school, who would wear whatever jewelry their elders made them, and there were the ones who cut their hair short and wore sports jerseys everywhere and worked to rid themselves out of the heavier, clipped accent a lot of the kids had. Neither was the “right” way for a young Native American teen to be, yet we were often pitted against one another as if there were a right way.
The other side of the coin is that stigma around not “acting your culture” is huge, so being told we or someone else is “acting white” or “not Native American enough” is sort of a huge sore point. With Native American culture and identity trickling away as more and more young people lose touch with it, there’s a big divide in many communities over who looks and acts more Native American rather than white. While a lot of Jane’s storyline is clearly played for laughs, a lot of it is actually very accurate, too. Obviously my or anyone else’s approval with the storyline doesn’t negate anyone else’s discomfort, just as someone else’s discomfort with it doesn’t automatically mean everyone else should feel the same… I just wanted to weigh in.
Crap ETA my comment above:
Two incidents in junior high that I feel perfectly show the dueling expectations of Native American kids where I grew up.
1) As soon as I got into junior high, myself and any other kid listed as Native American were automatically enrolled with the school counselor. We were told it was because we were “at greater risk” because of our “living situations” (!?) for becoming drug or alcohol dependent or having problems with school. I was a nerdy gamer who got top grades… I remember the shock and shame I felt when I realized what I was in that office for, and an almost immediate desire to distance myself from that part of my heritage. In hindsight, it was really, REALLY racist for the all-white school to decide to label all their Native American kids as troubled regardless of who they were or what they were actually doing, but it does illustrate the preconceptions and negative stereotypes I grew up with, which a lot of us would have done anything to get away from.
2) The very next year, all the Native American kids were rounded up and taken by bus to Edmonton to see this big speech about our culture. I can’t even remember who the guy was, just that he was well known for delivering these talks and a lot of the sketches went back to “if you don’t love your culture you’ll turn into a worthless abusive drunk or you’ll basically be half a person”. It was a very weird experience… a lot of the actual talk about history and culture were interesting, and at the end we heard from an elder who was so old and heavily accented she needed an interpreter as she talked about being taken away from her family and given a white name and thrown in school, but then we get back to OUR school and we’re all teased for our heritage by the white kids, made to feel like it’s something weird and awkward. You couldn’t win.
Jane’s character is maybe a more flamboyant and laugh-at-her-rather-than-with concept of a Native American, but I’m just saying I empathize.
@Leah, I totally get that, and I get that there is no monolith, coordinated “Native American Response” to this. My main issue is that this character’s storyline (which I have no issue with) was with a whiter-than-white actress. That’s the part that made me uncomfortable with it.
I’m not commenting on the show but don’t you hate it when Netflix, Hulu, etc. ask you if you are still watching something? It’s like, calm down Netflix when I am done you will be the first to know. You know how? I’ll exit the webpage. Calm yourself.
@Redheadedgirl
No, I got that, I was just pointing out that that “whiter than white” actress actually embodies everything a lot of us Native American girls both simultaneously hated and wanted to be growing up, which you can argue actually serves the storyline and the point it’s trying to make. 🙂 Could it have been done with an actual Native American actress? Possibly. Is the show dealing in a one-off jokey fashion with something that might have been better served a little more depth like Kimmy herself? Also possibly. Again, while I understood and even empathized with the concept behind the character, whether it was executed well beyond a joke that makes a ridiculous character even MORE ridiculous is arguable. Casting a white actress in a role as an, essentially, very closeted Native American woman, isn’t necessarily a joke everyone (even myself) may feel the show is entitled to make. I love a lot of Tina Fey’s work, despite her tendency to sometimes put her foot in her mouth, and I hope the show continues to evolve on the helpful criticism it’s getting.
Just yesterday, I was reading the internet while hubs watched episode 2 or 3 of UKS on his PC next to me. I kept looking over and making a face like someone had farted. I think what did it for both of us was the white actress playing a Native American woman pretending to be white. I occasionally watched 30 Rock with hubs (again, while doing something else because his humor and mine just Do Not Match), and it’s just the same breakneck pace of “let’s throw jokes at you like you’re a wall and we’re seeing what sticks”. I think Brynhild has it right. UKS’s humor is not earned. It punches down and then dons an affectation of being pro-whatever they just punched. It’s bizarre.
Mark me down on the side of loving this show. The Native American thing was hilarious. I am not Native American. All I could think of is the way that a lot of Anglos say things like, “I’m one-twenty-fourth Cherokee” like it means something and they usually look a lot like Jane Krakowski. Native Americans, whatever tribe, are just another form of Magical Negro to a lot of white people. That’s the kind of cultural appropriation that is offensive. So Krakowski’s character was a perfect send up of that point of view. Also, when she tosses off the line, “Yeah I know. White people, right?” it was possibly the most perfectly delivered joke in a series of perfectly delivered lines. (Also, her dad’s comment about the Iron Eagle, the joke about the city that never sleeps, and basically the rest of the series.)
Clearly this was a show that was going to push a lot of buttons. They went there; they made a show about rape and kidnapping. And in a landscape of shows that are darker than dark, it was refreshing and light and cotton-candy and wonderful.
I really wanted to love this show, mostly because everyone on the Internet seemed to and I wanted to be part of the fun! And, while I don’t hate it, I still haven’t made it past episode 6. I like the lead actress, I like her joy and her bright colors and I like her attempts to make herself the person she wants to be, but the rest of the show? The comedy is too broad and dated and oddly tone deaf.
I think it’s the sketch comedy roots.
…I never exactly loved 30 Rock either….shhh…..
I too am a lover of this ridiculous show!! I loved it, exactly what I needed post surgical recovery!! I wanted bright colors (her clothes!!), rainbows and unicorns! I took no offense to any of it because it was a Tina Fey show, I knew what I was getting into. Plus… it’s a TV show… It was comical and I giggled (even creepy, Jon Hamm is yummy!)
Perfect prescription!
I’m interested in watching this… I’ve heard a lot and this has just added to my curiosity. Unfortunately, my to-watch list is longer than my to-read list, and I don’t have a Netflix account. It definitely sounds like it’s worth a go though
I liked it. I see the problems with it, because sometimes what they think is satire does edge WAY too close to making fun of groups that are already represented poorly in U.S. media. And I’m totally on board with critiquing that, and with people choosing not to watch it because of that.
But I personally love Kimmy’s character so much. I love that they made a show about women’s resilience in the face of a dark, traumatic event. I have had a number of friends who have experienced traumatic events that left them with flashbacks and triggers and irrational fears. But they obviously still laugh and have goals and go about getting as much out of life as they can. They just have to fight harder for it than someone who has never had to go through that kind of trauma. I think that, for all it’s faults and occasionally broad characterization, there are ways in which it gives its trauma survivors more autonomy, dignity, and reality than any t.v. show I’ve seen so far.
Sidenote: The Gregory Brothers actually helped make the theme song. There’s a reason it sounds like them.
Okay, I am totally not hip and I admit it. When you keep saying Kimmy has agency or she’s lost her agency or she’s getting her agency back – I don’t get what you’re saying. What does “agency” mean in your language?
It refers to the capacity of people to make their own decisions and determine their own course of action. In Kimmy’s case, she had her agency taken away from her for 15 years- she couldn’t leave, she couldn’t make any decisions about her life except to decide to not break. Once she is given the ability to make her choices again, she keeps actively deciding what she will do, how she will live her life. Does that make sense?
I’m with Brynhild on this one. I started watching and had to stop. The annoying, brash and essentially unfunny totality of the first couple of episodes received a one-star on my Netflix profile. Thinking it over, there was something weirdly simplistic, unsophisticated and laugh-tracky about the viewing experience. Let’s go watch Call the Midwife instead!
As an FYI the show’s on YouTube.
Maybe I’ll go to hell for saying this, but I’ve never thought that Tina Fey is particularly funny–she forces a lot of her humor and this show’s no different. There’s the creepiness factor too. Just … no. Ick. I could only get through half of the first episode.
I thought something was wrong with me when the very beginning of the show made me feel sad and disgusted with the world. I had high expectations because I enjoy and respect Tina Fey and had heard good things about the show. I didn’t even make it past the intro before I had to turn it off. I think it may be just as Brynhilde pointed out. Seeing the contradiction of this awful thing happening to someone and the repercussions of that event being treated as humor tore me up inside.
AND I didn’t get the funny and witty show I was looking forward to.
@Trish: *whispers* Me too! Can I join you in the Not a Fey Fan corner of hell?
I’ve just never gotten her humor and find some of it kind of tone-deaf. Further confession: I have never once laughed at SNL. I guess it’s just not my thing.